d been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced
himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks
which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure
from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at
her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash
of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her
strength.

In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of
time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped
behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that Mrs.
Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.

"It's not true that you don't know where she is?" His face contracted.
"At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."

"But surely you must know how to find her?"

He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her
if I didn't know how!"

They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating
farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible
to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and
thank you," he said.

She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"

His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to
find my wife."

"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.

"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.

"Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that
everything in the past should be forgotten?"

"Yes--when it suits his convenience!"

"Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him
a struggle?"

"I can only think of what it has cost her!"

Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she
has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"

"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever
go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after
this!"

Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her
sweet impenetrable face.

"Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she
decides," she affirmed.

XLII

JUSTINE'S answer to her husband's letter bore a New York address; and
the surprise of finding her in the same town with himself, and not half
an hour's walk from the room in which he sat